Tài liệu CPU 06-2008 doc

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COMPUTER POWER USER June 2008 + Vol 8 Issue 06

54 The SPI 4-1-1

Your Vista Service Pack 1 Cheat Sheet

56 The Final Cut 4

Copyright 2008 by Sandhills Publishing Company Computer Power User is a trademark of Sandhills Publishing Line tata

Ce 0607, Lncdn, NE 685 ubsaber Sznicec (60) 424730 Peiodia posagepsidal —_ DlogueBax anh

1)” 6.1.1.1 1 1 Page 60

30 Asus Striker ll Extreme

WidowPC Sing 917D SLI

Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick 55 Vigor Gaming Force Recon OXN

Out With The 8800 GTX &

Hard Hat Are:

40 Tips & Tutorials b

41 Hungry Like The Wolf(dale)

Overclocking Intel's Core 2 Duo £8500

44 Mad Reader Mod

Predatron

46 Advanced Q&A Corner

48 X-Ray Vision Witricity Promises Wireless Power

50 White Paper In-Flight Internet Takes Off

Loading Zone

72 The Bleeding Edge Of Software Inside The World OF Betas

73 Up To Speed Upgrades Thatll Keep You Humming Along

Beyond The Hardware Increase Performance With These System Optimization Utilities Paragon NTFS For Mac OS X Steganos Internet Security 2008 PerfectDisk 2008 for VMWare ExMigration 2.1.0.1

Dialogue Box Phelinux Open Sauce

le Laptop Linux

Caught In The Web

82 The Great Disrupter How The Internet Changes Everything

85 The Department Of Stuff wireless.txt

Digital Living

86 Road Warrior New GE Digicams, Lenovo's Do-It-All

‘AC Adapter, Garmin Enters Mobile

Phone Fray & More

At Your Leisure Games, Gear, Movies & Music

The Cutting Edge

Do You Want That WYSIWYG, Or Fast?

“He Destroyed An Industry.”

Strange stats and other oddball items from computng’s periphery

84, 96, 98

EDITOR'S NOTE

I there a more controversial two-word phrase than “Windows ff

Vista” inthe tech industry these days? Ie seems like wherever I sandhils

go and whoever I'm talking o, if someone drops a V-bomb, Publishing:

people immediately begin choosing sides I remember talking 0

people years ago who grumbled that Windows 98 was little more (For questions about your subscription oF place an

than a minimal refresh of Win95, but most people who use their nde or change aes)

(OSes for more than launching office apps understood that Win98 —

was a substantial upgrade in several areas And as afi as Windows Fa (02)4792195,

‘Me turned out to be, there wasn’t much controversy—pretty much ee

everyone agreed it was wretched Maybe chat’s why there was less Lino NEEBSOV 267

hand-wringing and indecision when WinXP came along, but there tours

certainly seemed to be much less drama surrounding its launch Mon -Fi7am fo8 pm (CST)

Pve said it before and Ill Sat: am co4pm (CST)

it again: We are not anti-Vista or nline Customer Service & Subscription Center

anti-Windows, and we're certainly not anti-Microsoft Having —

said that, I think it's more than fair to point outa product's Web Serves

shortcomings, especially when it's one that is so central to the (For queions about our Web ste)

: ‘sthslo@coumagcom ccurrent personal computing landscape es

The issue as I see it is this: Mainstream consumers want their Autoraon For Reprints

PCs to work the way other consumer electronics devices work

‘Thats, they want to push the power button, select the stuff they

want to do/watch/listen to, and then they wane to do/watchilisten

to it Vista actually takes us further from realizing chat kind of

functionality on a number of levels, and that is areal problem

Toll Free (800) 247-4880 Fae (402) 479.2193 oil Sell

“du fBcpumagcom Fe (402) 4792108

131 W Grand Drive

Maybe not for you or me, but certainly for the industry in general Lincoln NE68S21

Ever wonder, for instance, why home theater PCs aren't in every S0kckpibi set

home by now2 Ìs not because HTPCs aren'ta good idea—the (809)3824659

concept is virtually unassailable, The trouble is the technology itself Se

creates a barrier between the average consumer and the content they Nhớ

want to enjoy Every extra click, every further decision you force an -jearec oso a ik

average user to make increases exponentially the likelihood thar they Fa (2) 4792095,

120W Harvest Dr LUncoln NE 68521

won't get done what they're trying to do

We're probably nowhere neat solving this issue in 2008,

although Bill Gates did say very lately

that Windows 7 could show up “in

the next year or so.” (He may have

been referring to the beta.) Inthe

‘meantime, Microsoft has dropped the

first Service Pack for Vista, and in this

‘month's spotlight section we take a

look at what itis, what it en

and what you can do

quite get Windows where you

want it to be We even have a

very interesting look at areal

power user alternative, Windows Soi yee

Server 2008,

So imake sure you bine pleng0E - )

your favorite beverage handy, sete

in, and enjoy "

2D

Chris Trumble, Publication Editor, CPU

loesn't

ÖF PC PERFORMANCE

JACK UP YOUR GRAPHICS

Combined with the speed overclocksbilfy,and next generation featuresofthe new NVIDIA* nfovre” 790i motherboard

ä paicof GeForce" 9800 GX2-based graphic cardsrùnning in Quad NVIDIAP SLI* mode the Alienware* Area-51®isthe

‘most awe-inspiring screaming fast PC gaming platform on the planet

reach 293 million units, according to Gartner That's nearly an 11% increase

over the 264 million units that shipped in 2007 Better news is that revenue

is expected to jump 6% over that for 2007 Two k

increased popularity of mobile systems (particularly low-cost notebooks)

among buyers and a significant increase of shipments to emerging

counies, In Q4 2007, PC shipments to emerging markets grew 22%

and made up 60% of worldwide PC growth, Gartner says A

Bad News For Dell Fans

Despite recent plans to close a plant in Austin, reduce jobs by at least

8,800, and cut $3 billion in costs over the next few years, there was some

‘good news to come out of the Dell camp recently with the release ofa sub-

$1,000 notebook with a Blu-ray drive Suspect battery life aside, the D

Inspiron 1525 now offers an optional Blu-ray drive (backward-compatible and

burns DVDs/CDs) star at less than $880 A Blu-ray burner option is also avail-

able The 1525, meanwhile, gives you a 15.4-inch screen with 720p supported resolu-

tion and an HDMI port to output video to your HDTV &

What's Happening * Hardware

Sony Takes HD Small, Really Small

‘Amidst recent news of the PlayStation 3 gaining Blu-ray Internet connectivity ability and Sony Pictures releasing its frst Blu-ray movies with Web hooks to obrain bonus material and features, Sony Electronics boasted about what it says is the world’s smallest, lightest HD camcorder Juice box-sized, the HDR-TG1 Handycam (about $900) measures just 4.7 x 2.5 x 1.3 inches (HxWsD) and weighs a paltry 10.6 ounces To gain its sexy size, the HDR-TGI foregoes traditional stor- age methods in favor of Memory Stick PRO Duo/PRO Duo Mark? cards to store 1,920 x 1,080 AVCHD video (4MP stills) The titanium-constructed camera will ship with a 4GB PRO Duo Mark2 card (25 to 85 minutes, depending on quality) when the expected May U.S release date arrives À,

eBay & Adobe Get Involved In Hacked Vista Rig

In Aprils issue, we reported that CanSecWest 2008 organizers had something special

up their sleeves for their ninth annual conference in March Turns out they gave

attendees a chance to hack and win VAIO, Fujitsu, and MacBook Air laptops run- U.S Government

ring Ubuntu 7.10, Vista Ultimate SP1, and Mac OS X 10.5.2, respectively Only

the Linux rig remained pure Shane Macaulay, a researcher with Security Objectives,

meanwhile, not only successfully hacked the Vista rig via an Adobe Flash Player Paper Cut

exploit he reportedly says could affect 90% of worldwide systems, he attempted t0

auction the laptop on eBay, which quickly yanked the listings For its part, reports say

‘Adobe was apparently aware ofthe flaw before Macaulay’s handiwork but had yet t0 c

issue a fix As for the MacBook Air, iPhone-hacker Charlie Miller, an analyst with BOLERO

Independent Security Evaluators, picked up a $10,000 prize for his break-in, which ee

took less than two minutes “We wanted to spend as litte time as possible coming MAE Ven ly)

up with an exploit, so we picked Mac OS X,” he said TT SS EA ốc Eco

to conduct the 2010 census

Flip Video Ultra Sets The Camcorder Pace Sim côi Sen

What's the best-selling camcorder on Amazon.com these days? Surprisingly, it

appears to be Pure Digital's Flip Video Ultra In fact, Pure Digital says the cell

phone-sized Ultra has gobbled up 13% of the camcorder marker since its release

‘months ago So why is a

$149.99 (1GB)/S179.99 eed eee IU

hundreds of tech requir

(2GB) camcorder with: eq ‘

just a 1.5-inch (528 x ments that have yet

minutes of built-in stor- di to use The chang‹

age, 2X digital oom, and | ị Ặ dly will add $3 billion

virtually no noteworthy Sai popes tae d out the census, Ouch À to the overall cost of carrying

of use, brother Anyone

from a grade schooler to your tech-clucless Uncle Larry can start filming MPEG-4

video immediately without feeling intimidated or out of his league As for transfers, a

flip-out USB 2.0 connector handles the chore Ak

ment officials will ha physically jot down dav rning the nation’s 300

PU / June 2008 7

What’s Happening fol Watch

Stretch Raises $15 Million To Build More

Surveillance Camera Compression Chips

Stretch of Sunnyvale, Calif, has raised $15 million to expand its operations as it

rolls out new versions of its software-configurable processors for surveillance cameras

“The chips are a hybrid of a RISC microprocessor and an FPGA (field programmable gate

array), The microprocessor gives the chip its fast performance, and the FPGA makes it flexible,

With sofiware tailored to surveillance applications, the company has tailored its chips to do video

‘compression tasks in the newest security cameras The chips can help process high-quality H.264 video at

30 frames per second and compress it so that can be transferred and stored without taking up too much band-

width, Surveillance chips are going into security cameras that are increasingly sophisticated and able to discern faces from

videos Such cameras are popular in London, where there is a camera for every six people, and China, which is ratcheting

up security forthe Beijing Olympics, Las Vegas casinos are also heavy users of security cameras, said CEO Craig Lytle

Surveillance camera chips themselves are expected to more than double to $1.25 billion in 2011, according to market

LED Makers Come Out Of The Woodwork To Replace Light Bulbs F

Light-emiting diodes have lit everything from the Eiffel Tower to fancy PC gaming rigs But the Holy Grail

lights LEDs are semiconductor devices that emit light when hie with electricity

LEDs convert electricity into light far more efficiently, saving a lot on energy costs But it takes several LEDs

to form a white light, a factor that drives up costs Hence, the old-fashioned light bulb still dominates home

lighting and car headlights But a new wave of startups is challenging established LED makers such as Philips

Lumileds in tying to create white-light LEDs, Among them are Optoclectronix in San Jose, Calif; Quanlight

in San Diego: Group IV Semiconductor in Ottawa, Canada; and Bridges in Sunnyvale, Calf The winner

right be able to replace 4 billion light bulbs in North America alone, according to Group IV

'With Silicon Devices

cau Reensd Last month's Currant

fof locks have dominated the ti

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iil Cove 2 Gud 09480450 Than, M8 — TSIẾ” - soluonthareliminateconsddenblecoss itl Core 2 Gua 095804507 iil Coe 2Berene O¥E700 Tran, T2006 S15 $1085 S90" —1e79— | Slated to silicon area and power con- e iil Coe 2 Eero OYE THE207 $1965 $108 sumption In some cases, chat will mean iil Cove 2 Exon ORGES0 SOR BUS aca | SOOT CS Ki, Z-TÃ SB —S able to pu a‘@hole apie one intl Core 2Eerone Qua GXOGS0 GHz TOMB cache 133M FS8@Sam_—_1122007 Đ0G — Đi j bángsbletep os

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8 June 2008 / wow-computerpowerusercom

‘There's a new National Cyber Security

Center sheriff in town, and his name is

Rod Beckstrom Known in Silicon Valley

as an entrepreneur and founder of

Twiki.net, Beckstrom also authored “The

Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable

Power of Leaderless Organizations,”

which “presents a new model for analyz-

ing organizations, leadership style, and

‘competitive strategy.” President Bush cre-

ated the NCSC in January under execu-

tive order Beckstrom will answer to

Department of Homeland Security

Director Michael Chertoff and has been

charged with “coordinating cyber security

cfforts and improving situational aware-

ness and information sharing across the

federal government,” as well as to help

“protect federal networks and enhance

capabilities that defend and reduce cyber-

associated risks.”

Fixmymovie.com =

Gives Video Clips A Good { Cleaning

Add Fixmymovie.com to the ligeof handy video software freely available on the

Web This gem rakes video clips (up to 15MB, 352 x 288) shot on cell phones,

Can Warner Bros

Hit The Right ISP

Notes?

Paying extra at the Internet pump each

month could soon grant us unlimited access to a massive database of music to freely download, upload, copy, and share

‘Warner Bros has tapped Jim Griffin, a former Geffen Music exec, to put such a plan in motion, according to

Portfolio.com Users would pay a $5 monthly fee, for example, which would help create a pool of money (possibly up

to $20 billion a year) chat musicians and

copyright holders would share “I don’t think we should be suing students, and I don’t think we should be suing people if their homes,” Griffin says “We want to monetize the anarchy of the Internet.”

Some critics say the plan isa form of uni- versal taxation, but Griffin says, “I assure you, we have no such interes in

government running this or having any part of i”

Record Damages

Awarded

In Web Libel Case

TẾ you believe everything on the Web, English resident Peter Walls is a ped- ophile, is corrupt, hired hit men, and sex- ually harassed and bullied his staff

Fortunately for Walls, a judge believed

differently, awarding the Gentoo Group housing chief executive nearly $200,000

in damages as part ofa libel case against

John Finn of Pallion Housing

Reportedly, Finn created Dad's Place, a Web site where false information about Walls and others was anonymously post-

ed “There is no doubt that the Internet can be a fantastic tool for good, but we urgently need legal change to enable vi tims of Internet abuse to have a

and more effective route to justic

Walls stated

digicams, or Web cams, and increases resolutions up to 4X, brightens dark areas, eliminates noise and arifacts,and more Powered

by MotionDSP technology, edits rake up to 30 minutes depending on file size, but once completed, you can push the clip to YouTube (Blogger and MySpace support is coming),

‘embed it in your site, download a high-res version, or email itt others You can upload clips

at the site, via email, or from a mobile device Look for a premium version coming soon Ak

Artwork Dunder Mifflin Would Be Proud Of

‘The Web's best aspect is that you can point your browser in any direction and find something utterly amazing you had no idea previously existed Casein point isthe stagger

artwork of Peter Callesen (www.petercallesen.com), a Danish artist who bases his works

“around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensi

Just let your eyes pour over Callesen’s mesmerizing creations, which come to life primarily using common 80gsm A4 paper, which you probably have in your printer Callesen says, “The thin white paper also gives the paper sculptures a

uncertain whar that entails, don't sweat

P ware

Adobe Sets Up Shop Online Music Downloads

Adobe gifted photogs one and all with Photo Express (beta) in “Think how far we've come with how we get our

March The free online photo service includes 2GB of storage: music, According to reports, Rockstar and Ama-

galleries; and, of zon.com are taking matters even farther in the

course, editing nd Thefe Auto IV by

tools Adobe is

reportedly plan-

ning a premium

service and inte-

gration with its

‘game option that lets players mark a song they rẻ interested in, Players then receive texts about the song Registered Rockstar Games Social Club mem-

ening”; “itis positioned to become the “gateway drug’ to the

entire family of Photoshop products”; “it doesn't yet hat

connection to Flickr, one of the most popular photo storage

sites”; and “in ease of use, Express makes Photoshop look

Windows 7 next year? Like this Windows box,

Mr Gates’ announcement is not

to be taken seriously.”

is Windows 7

Coming Sooner Than Later?

Several Web sites reported in April that Bill Gates dropped hints during a speech in Miami about the next Windows OS,

sometime in the next year or so we will have

“I'm super-enthused about what it will do in los of ways

is if Gates was referring to a development release vs a full

it and 64-bit versions will be available Previously

at earliest was generally believed based on past Microsoft estimates

Coincidentally, Microsoft also extended Windows XP's death sentence (on

low-cost laptops, at least) until June 30, 2010, or a year following Windows 7's

What's Happening *

Software

eherts sony( BMG

Commits Piracy Boo Boo MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

First, rootkits; now this, French company PointDev,

maker of Windows administrative software tools, said in late March a Sony BMG employee

gave PointDev a pirated key for PointDev's Ideal Migration software during a tech support

call This led officials to raid Sony BMG's servers, reportedly unveiling illegal software on Wieder elU

four servers Further, the Business Software Alliance stated it believes up to 47% of software Serves Up Smaill-

on Sony BMG computers could be illegal PointDev is claiming $475,000 in damages The | XU N /JDXT

company’s CEO Agustoni Paul-Henry stated, “We are not interested in an amicable settle-

‘ment Its not just a question of money but more importantly in principle.” Conta es

researchers say they have de H3

In March, Creative demanded Daniel Kawakami, aka Daniel_K, cease modding drivers for

its products This despite many SoundBlaster X-Fi users insisting Daniel_K’s Vista-based

mods are the best available, Creative later backtracked, stating “Outside developers have

been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our

Sound Blaster products ” Kawakami posted in April that Creative promised him a free

upcoming X-Fi 2, but he declined Instead, he's getting cards “from other companies that

contacted me.” Additionally, he says he won't be enabling X-Fi and Audigy mod features

because Creative told him “providing an alternative for their customers is good for them

and increases their sales, especially when someone is doing it for free Given the current situ-

ation, I cannot let this happen.” À

Motherboard Date Avail

ABLIPISE 15

ASRock ALVeNF7G-HD720p R6 0220, p/leutope aerock comfos/AMG/ALIVeNE7G-HO720p(R1295)220) zp,

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Bleslar TP35D2.A7 P3Sbac05 ‘won bostar com wiuploadBioe/P35ba005 bst

Gigabyte GA-EP95-DS9 (rev 2.1) F30 camelca gga-byfeconVFiListBIOS/motherboord.bios.ga-ep35-d43 f2øxe

MSI X38 Demond 1.3 ebalmeicomiwfndexphp?lne=downloadfieRdnoz64028iypo-bios

“Shute SP35P2 SP35S205, nage shudle com/fesourceCenleidownload fIe Epffio ld=11009

(ŒU /ne2008 TT

Compiled by Steve Smith

The Job Search

‘Think be

dream job? Tech recruiter Volt

Workforce Solutions is on the

hunt for a number of eager vid-

eo game players who can work

for what it calls “The Software

Giant” that happens to be

quartered in Redmond, Was

Gee, who could that be?

a game tester isa

d-

The game testers will be working

onan action and comedy title

thar is based on a popular kiddie

cartoon from TV Apparently,

the game is in deep and acceler-

ated development, because our

unnamed “giant” software com-

pany is working testers throu:

day and night shifts locating

in the gameplay Exper-

Despite privacy fears over putting

sensitive personal information

Coen

recent Deloitte study say they

=— —

"`"

n test results and medi

records Confidence in online

Percent of Americans who

use non-voice services

(photos, text, etc.) on mobile

Percent of mobile phone subscribers who use mobile

banking services

Percent of mobile Internet

users who make online

U.S Still Leads

Ropes, [owe 74107

the United States Today, we Sepa al

account for less than a quarter of Germany I8

the 694,260,000 active Internet United Kingdom 80180

travelers, according to comScore South Korea 24645

World Metrix France P9.884

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When PC Games Suck

Aw’ weekends ago, my nephew wanted to play a popular

PC strategy game with me, so I picked up a couple copies and

\ve began installing it on two gaming laptops as soon as I got

home, Forty-five minutes and several CD changes later, the game

was installed When my nephew launched the game for the first

time on his machine, the game claimed his laptop didn’t me

system requirements and refused to play I checked the minimum

system requirements on the box and found that his machine ex-

ceeded them in every arca I was irritated that the game had wasted

45 minutes of our time during installation before bothering to

mention that it wouldnt work, bur I had another gaming machine

in the house, so we hauled ic our and started again, Another 45

minutes, and both PCs were ready to play—or so we thought Now

they couldn’ see each other on the network

tried various networking configurations before finally conclud-

ing that we had better make sure that the games were properly

updated Thus began the patching ritual To kick things off,

had to patch the patching application chat came with the game six times, cach requiring a manual login and application restart, before I could finaly begin actually patching the game This, in turn, required many more patches and restarts (Lost count) Each restart required a

‘manual request for another patch check

‘On wwo occasions, my nephew and Ï thought we were fully patched, only to

launch the game and discover that the version numbers of our respective installs still differed Allin all it took three hours to get the games

up and running on my network I

also had to disconnect the comput- crs from the household network and set up a local router with hard-coded IP addresses to get them to see each other and, of course, go through the ritual of disabling fire-

walls and opening communication ports We had

enough time let in the day to play once before Ï

had to get back to work

Had I been an average

ny in question so I dashed off a “What the hell kind of crap

product are you making?!” email to him and felt much better afterward After I cooled off, I couldn't help thinking about why

PC games ate often such a nightmare to install and play and, more importantly, if I could find an angle to blame }

icin a CPU column! (That's a joke, by the way; Vista is such an abhorrent product that I hardly need to contrive problems to blame on it.) It struck me that many of PC gaming’ ills and the perceived strengths of console gaming are intimately linked to hhow games are sold and secured against piracy Consider, for example, that generally a consumer's options for getting access to

a game he wants to play are limited to shelling out $50 bucks up

front for the game sight unseen If you pay $50 bucks for a PC

game and lose the system requirement lotto, sorry sucka, thanks for the dough!

Assuming the game runs on your PC, the next set of hurdles is often the result of the DRM technology used to prevent piracy In the console world, the console is the key and the disc a game is shipped on is a locked vault containing the game The closed archi- tecture of the consoles combined with their hardwired security

‘measures makes them extremely hard for the average person t0 crack And because consoles are often sold at a lo

buy an expertly cracked box than to buy a brand-new, secure one

is, for example, is why there is no counterfeit market for change;

the metals coi tary value of the actual coins

Security on the PC is very different The PC is a wide-open

development environment that has many robust tools available for hacking it Also, the media and file formats that PC games are published on are open, not to mention that all modern PCs come with the ability to copy that media Until recently, PC game pub- lishers relied on DRM technologies that bind the installed PC

rosoft for

it costs more to

are made of are often worth more than the mone-

game to the presence of a key dise in order for the game to play:

OF course, this kind of solution is easily hacked, so PC games are

widely pirated More modern DRM solutions for PC games en-

crypt the game to unique attributes of the PC itis installed on,

such as the user’ hard drive ID, MAC address, ete, Once the

game is encrypted to the users computer, it is unlocked by a net-

wwork-served key Thus each copy of a game is uniquely encrypted

to the PC iris installed on

The reason patching PC games can be so nightmarish is a com-

bination of two factors First, a PC game shipped on a CD will

reach the average consumer many months after it was tested and

released In that time, Microsoft may

have released half a dozen security

patches, PC OEMs may have shipped |

millions of new PCs based on a new

Video chip, several updates to the

user's video drivers may have occurred,

and so on In short, the game is obso-

lete, broken, and in need of patching

the moment it is shipped in a box

(The irony of this observation, of

course, is that the reason this is mae a

problem for consoles is thar they have

not traditionally been connected to a

network: they are static devices The

minute they are connected, they inher-

it the same terrible user experience

problems of the PC.)

Second, PC DRM architecture

means that every game installed on a

user's machine is unique and cannot

share the same patch without remov-

ing the DRM, patching the underly-

ing bits, and reapplying the DRM on

the users machine without breaking the

Another obnoxious feature of PC DRM is that the DRM key

is also used to ensure that pirated copies of a game are not being used for multiplayer gaming Each player in a multiplayer PC game needs a unique valid DRM key to play with other players, Again the consoles’ lack of connectivity to a network hides this

problem because most multiplayer console games are played on a

single console using multiple controllers and a single shared screen, In effect, each console game comes

for multiplayer use

four free licenses

This column would seem to contra- dice my carlcr claims that we may be at the end of the console game business as wwe knew it, but for ewo important

"+ observations As consoles increasingly

go online, they inherit the bad user experience problems of the PC, and as

games move toward online business

models, the DRM problems tied to physical media distribution vanish into the history books Ifthe game my nephew wanted to play was free to play and supported by advertising, the game could have simply checked my system for compatibility over the Internet, downloaded and installed the fully cur- rent and patched version of itself in one pass, and even if I had trouble getting

the game to run on my network, I

wouldn't have been furious with the

medium because I wouldnt have gotten ripped for $50 up front only to discover the game didn’t work

In afew short years, the elimination of game's security In other words, PC game creators of Microsofts DirectX

patching is extraordinarily complex, often

leading to a terrible user experience Its

worth noting that Vistas absurd security

architecture compounds this problem

with its intrusive warning

L0 717.007

book “Renegades of the Empire” about

ee gee Chromeffets, an early effort by

create a multimedia

TT

CEO of Wild Tangent Inc., a technology

De TOO ey

eee 0

dependence on physical media for game dis-

tribution and shifts in the gaming business model will erase the differences between PC and console gaming This will ultimately lead to the collapse of the console marker,

leaving an extremely robust PC game mar-

ket in its wake

(NOTE: Even as I write this, highly paid,

dedicated teams of monkeys at Intel and Mi- crosofe may be working aggressively to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by fouling the

PC game market with low-quality graphics chips and bloated operating systems Heres hoping thas they get the mesage in time to actually add value to she consumer experience instead of impeding it) À

‘Send your feedback to thesaint@cpumagcom

UT nee 15

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Californian creation sounds like it should be German

Both are studies in excess, but for the French, less is more

by Marty Sems

The hills are alive with the sound of Blu-ray Swiss audio-

phile firm Goldmund goes blue with this $16,900, high-end

BD player (wwwgoldmund.com) The Eidos 20 BD makes

use of magnetic damping, as well as Goldmund's Mechanical Grounding construction, The idea is to reduce vibration and thus read errors and jitter you know, all that jitter and erra-

ta you normaly see from your totally inadequate Asian BD player There's also the company's special AC-Curator power supply, which promises to “dramatically” stabilize the video and audio, Hey, anything's possible Goldmund also is the home of the $300,000 Reference II, possibly the world’s

most-expensive turntable, so the emperor could indeed be

wearing kinee pants and an alpine hat for all we know

You dream of the urban maneuverability of a motorbike, only without all that wind-in-your-helmet and June bug-o- yourforehead nonsense Lumeneo's answer is a two-seater car no wider than a motorcycle (31 inches), one with zer0 emissions because it’s all electric (www.lumeneo.f) What?

OF course its French; why do you ask? Anyway, the cool

thing about the Smera is the way leans i

the curves for stability, just like a bike This 40bhp mi

whatsit has a 0 to 60mpph time of about cight seconds and

can roll about 93 miles on a charge The Smera should sell

for about 24,000 Euros (about $37,800), depending on the

cost of its lithium batteries Ie will debut in October at the

Mondial Paris motor show and hit the market early next year Plenty of time for you to lay off the chee

sants; ace all, you'll need to be able to fi inthe cockpic ¢ and crois-

Old-school tubes with newjack software management With

a Siegfried reference amp (www.tlcom), you get the best of

whacs old and whas new This 800-watt monoblock is

powerful enough to subdue Brunhild, yet sounds sweet

enough to seduce Kriemhild I's packed with vacuum tubes for extreme fidelity, as well as microprocessors that actively maintain the bias voltage of each individual tube You can monitor tube conditions on a readout on the front panel or even manage the amplifier remotely with your PC via RS-

232 Al this, plus tight power supply regulation, helps the Siegftied achieve an SNR greater than 1104B VTL says that its TL7.5 Series Il Reference Preamplifier ($16,500) would

be the perfect complement to a $48,000 pair of Siegfrieds

‘We imagine you'd probably need some speakers, too AA

về

Quad-GPU

Smackdown

hen pondering the benefit of dou-

bling the GPUs on a graphics card,

‘one can’t help but recall Spinal Tap's

Nigel Tufnel as he retorts in mock cock-

ney, “Well, it’s one louder, isn’

AMD and Nvidia's latest high-end graph-

ies cards, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and

GeForce 9800 GX2, mate a pair of the

respective company's top-performing

GPUs to make the fastest graphics cards

currently available We took these hot

rods for a spin in both single-card (dual-

GPU) and dual-card (quad-GPU) config-

trations to sce if they live up to the hype

‘or just blow hot air

Skulltrail Snags

‘Testing the 3870 X2 and 9800 GX2

presented us with a unique opportunity:

testing SLI and CrossFire on a neutral plat-

form Generally speaking, SLI only works

with Nvidia chipsets and CrossFire only

‘works on AMD or Intel chipsets That is

until Skulleral, with its pair of nForce 100

chips and native CrossFire support, blazed

path to our doorstep The system features

«ight cores of raw CPU power in the form

of two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775

processors clocked at 3.2GHz, Intel’s

1D5400XS motherboard, 4GB of Micron

FB-DIMM DDR2-8800 memory, and

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Sadly, our ideal platform quickly turned

into a nightmare testing scenario The

pair of x16 slots that Intel recommends

using for SLI and CrossFire were separat-

ced by a single PCI slot, so both pairs of

dual-slor graphics cards were sandwiched

together, leaving no room for hot air to

exhaust between the cards, Furthermore,

the extra-long cards completely obstructed

the D5400XS's already-overburdened chipset cooler The chipset fan actually

made contact with the 9800 GX2s, leav-

ing a circular scar in the glossy black paint of the cards The final nail in the coffin was slammed home when we start-

cd testing and got lower-than-expected scores for both AMD and Nvidia When wwe contacted the companies, both said

that the slow FB-DIMM memory was

holding us back, and Nvidia reported

thar Skullerail’s PCI-E version 1.1 bus

was standing in the way of the PCI-E

2.0-capable 9800 GX2s" ability to push

pixels As a result, we had to build two systems using the respective company's latest enthusiast chipset, which in turn forced us to use different processors and memory

in The Red Corner

‘To power the AMD CrossFireX sys-

tem, we used the 2.5GHz AMD Phenom

X4 9850, which is the current quad-core

flagship Phenom and comes free of the

‘TLB errata that plagued the initial launch

‘We installed the processor into a Cross- FireX-certfied Asus M3A32-MVP, which

is buile on the native PCI-E 2.0 790EX chipset The motherboard (or more accu- rately, Phenom's onboard memory con-

troller) forced us to use DDR2 memory,

so we installed 2GB of Corsair Dominator

DDR2-1066 memory We used an 850W

‘CoolerMaster Real Power Pro PSU, even

though CrossFireX only requires a 750W

PSU The only shared component be- tween the AMD and Nvidia systems was the 150GB Western Digital Rapror The (OS was Windows Vista Ultimate, and we used Caralyst video driver version 8.3

hardware

throughout testing We used two stock- clocked 3870 X2s, one from Sapphire and the other from HIS

When we first gor a glimpse of the specs of AMD's two-headed beast, we

| couldn't help but notice thar the card’s

640 stream processors were capable of beter than 1 teraflop of GPU computing

power, compared to a single 3870's 497

gigaflops That's largely thanks to a per-

GPU core clock bump of 50MHz, to

825MHz Each GPU still has a 256-bit memory bus and 512MB of GDDR3

clocked at 900MHz, for a total of IGB of memory per card The 3870 X2's dual GPUs have a total of 640 stream proces- sors, 32 texture units, and 32 render back- ends The 3870 X2 features two power connectors, a 6-and 8-pin variety, but

impressivel

clocked) on two 6-pin power connectors The card also has a peak power rating of

196W AMD installed a rather conven-

tional heatsink and shroud, which com- pletely enclose the card and vent all heat out the back of the case

Like the single-GPU variety, the 3870 X2 supports ATVs PowerPlay Technology

to dynamically throtdle GPU power de- pending on the current demand, slashing power consumption when idle, The HD

3870 X2 also supports DirectX 10.1, which brings with it Shader Model 4.1, global

illumination effects, improved antialiasing performance, and new HDR effecs, The driver we used for testing also officially adds

software-level support for DirectX 10.1 and

the card’ built-in hardware tessllator

This card also features AMD's dedicat-

ed UVD hardware, which offloads H.264, AVG, and VC-I video decoding from the

, it runs just fine (not over-

(CPU RANKING (O= ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS | @ @@ 2.5 = ABSOLUTELY AVERAGE | @

'® 5 = ABSOLUTELY PERFECT

PU / tune 2008 T9.

hardware

U Like all of AMD's graphics cards |

since the HD 2000 Series, the 3870 X2

has built-in audio hardware for native

audio and video over HDMI The back-

plane of the 3870 X2 doesn't have a built=

in HDMI port like the 9800 GX2 does,

but a simple adapter connected to one of

the card's two dual-link DVI ports gets

the job done The backplane also features

an HDTV-out port

CrossFire on a card AMD's first stab

at the dual-GPU graphics card is an ambi-

tious departure from Nvidia's past and

current efforts The card consists of two

3870 GPUs bolted ro a single 10.5-inch

slab of PCB The 3870 X2, like its single-

GPU siblings, is manufactured on a

55nm process, which enabled AMD's,

engineers to cram an impressive 1.3 bil- lion transistors on the card The 3870 X2

is constructed on 12-layer PCB, which allowed AMD more room to position and isolate the card's glut of components

Unlike the Radeon HD 3870, however, AMD used older PCLE 1.1 technology for the 3870 X2% bridge chip, which splits its 48 lanes between each GPU and the PCL-E x16 slot

As we went co press, Catalyst 8.3

support three- and four-GPU configura- tions for OpenGL games, but AMD is working on a fix to be released soon

In The Green Corner

To power our SLI system, we used Intel’s 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

$449 AMD ati.amd.com eco

‘Specs: GPU: Radeon

HD 3870 X2; GPU core

‘clock: 825MHz; Memory: 16B GDDR3 (900MHz):

640 stream processors

seated in Evga's nForce 790i Ultra SLI

motherboard, which features three wid spaced PCI-E x16 slots to support Three- Way SLI The Evga motherboard also supports PCI-E 2.0 and a 1,600MHz FSB We installed 2GB of Corsair Ballistix DDR3-2000 memory To power

chine, we used Thermal-take’s Quad SLI-

certified 1kW Tough-power PSU We

used ForceWare video driver version

174.53 throughout testing Our pair of

9800 GX2s came courtesy of PNY

Consider for a moment that to defeat

the GeForce 8800 Ultra, AMD had to

combine two of its highest-end GPUs on

a single card That fact alone illustrates the kind of superior breeding the 9800 GX2 has The 9800 GX2 is essentially

two clock-tweaked G92-based 8800

GTS GPUs, each mounted to a dedicat-

ed slab of PCB, in SLI, and wired to

communicate over a single x16 PCI-E

2.0 interface The pair of GPUs in the

9800 GX? feature a 600MHz core clock

and a toral of IGB (512MB per GPU) of

the card's 256 stream processors at 1.5GI

to deliver 768 gigaflops of raw shader

power The 9800 GX2 also features an

unmatched 128 texture filtering unis

and 32 ROPs The 9800

maximum board power rating of 197W

and gets all that juice via the PCI-E 2.0

slot and a pair of 8-pin and 6-pin power

connectors Nvidia says it designed the

has a

9800 GX2 to operate safely at up to 105 degrees Celsius Better crank those fans toll

The backplane of the 9800 GX2 fea- tures a pair of dual-link DVI connectors,

an HDMI connector (audio over HDM courtesy of your audio hardware's S/PDIF header), and a pair of LED indicators de- note the primary display port when run- ning quad SLI and whether the requisite power plugs are properly connected

Like the rest of Nvidia's G92-based cards, the 9800 GX2 is equipped with the latest PureVideo HDD engine, which tures hardware support for MPEG-2,

1, and H.264 decode DirectX 10.1 sup- port, however, i still nowhere to be found in Nvidia's graphics cards This

dware

GeForce 9800 GX2

$599 Nvidia www.nvidia.com

find an

set for rel

advantage of the new features

SLI on a card Users still feeling the burn of the failed GeForce 7950 GX2

may be reluctant to make the plunge on another dual-PCB card, but according to Nvidia, there are several advantages to the 9800 GX2’s design The two PCBs are facing one another, essentially placing

the GPUs as far apart as possible w!

maintaining a dual-slot form factor

(PU / June 2008 211

2

TT ¬ PPR One 1GB GDDRS

4

EU S44

eae PRR) 1G8 GDDRS Pang oie

World in Conflict (@XAA, 4XAF)

Company of Heroes (4XAA)

Slock specs: GPU: Rade‹

Sock specs: GPU: GeF¿

Nvidia's dual-face heatsink and a single

fan sit between the two 65nm-fabbed

chips to blast the double-dose of heated

air through vents on all sides of the card

But unlike AMD's 3870 X2, the 9800

GX2's heatsink exhausts a good portion

of its hot air inside the case The whole

thing is wrapped up nicely in an attrac-

-—if imposing—heat shroud, Nvidia

d

this dual-PCB design also gives

cach GPU room to breathe so that heat

doesn’t transfer from one GPU to the

other The extra PCB surface also provid-

ed Nvidi

{0 route traces to memory, which let

them achieve higher memory clocks

With such an unconventional heatsink,

‘engineers with greater room

however, watercooling the 9800 GX2 is

sure to be tricky Nvidia also stated that

the 174.53 driver only supports Quad

SLI in Vista

Quad Quandary

Nvidia calls the 9800 GX2 in Quad SLI

‘the ultimate, zero-compromise gaming

Core clock: 825MHz; 1GB GDDR43 (900MI

Do

platform.” Bur if you have the cash to buy $1,200 worth of graphics hardware plus another $250 to $350 for an SLI

motherboard, then chances are a 3

monitor isn’t outside your means

9800 GX2 reviewer's guide, however, mentions running Crysis at 1,920 x

1,200 with he settings at Very High but

tất

says nary a word about running 2,560 x 1,600 Even in the tables that feature

only actually tested at 1,600 x 1,200 To get a straight answer, we had to turn to AMD's reviewer's guide, which reports that Crysis has a known multi-GPU issue at 2,560 x 1,600 for both Nvidia and ATI cards, Our tests appeared to bear that ou

Neither AMD nor Nvidia's qu:

GPU platforms could muster playable

PNY GeForco 9800 GX2 ' PNY GeForco

9800 GX2 Quad

168 GDDRS feo Coates

N1

setup managed to dominate in 3DMark06 and Company of Heroes at both resolu- tions, but managed a barely playable 31.7fps at 2,560 x 1,600, Overall (with the exception of synthetic tests), Nvidia's

9800 GX2 was slightly faster, but the jury is still out pending new evidence (in the form of improved drivers) on whether paying an extra $300 is worth the minimal advantage we saw AMD's offering is also rather pricey, though sev- eral 790FX motherboards were nearly

The Heat Is On

ower users know that adequate CPU

cooling is of the utmost importance

Without it, a CPU will overheat, become

unstable, and eventualy die altogether

Aside from alleviating these problems,

though, good CPU cooling also offers a

host of other advantages A properly

cooled CPU, for example, will be easier to

overclock, which will yield better overall

performance It will also consume less

power because it requires less current, and

asa result ofa lower core temperature,

nearby components and internal case

temperatures will be lower, as well There

are a multitude of good reasons to ensure

a CPU is properly cooled, beyond just

protecting your investment

“Thanks to the demand of fervent enthu-

siasts, there are numerous CPU cooling

‘options currently availabe, and the product

pool continues to grow Advances in

heatsink design have resulted in a seem-

ingly never-ending influx of traditional

air coolers designed for multiple appica-

tions—quiet computing, overclocking, etc

‘Watercooling continues to creep closer and

closer to the mainstream, as wel, now that

casy-t0-instal, self-contained hits that

require minimal maintenance ae readily

available, Exoric,ultr-expensive Vapor

Phase-Change and thermoelecttcally

enhanced coolers are also available for those

who crave sub-ambient temperatures

With al of the different CPU cooling

options currently available to power users

we thought it would be a good idea to

round up a few units that cover a broad

range of the spectrum We've pulled to-

gether six CPU coolers for this roundup

that are all compatible with Intel and

AMD's desktop processors, ranging from

the powerful liquid-air-TEC (thermoelec-

tric couplers) hybrid CoolIT Freezone

Elite to the more traditional tower-type

ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 Premium

We took all of the coolers to task with

a high-end quad-core processor running

in stock and overclocked configurations

and had some surprising results Although more exotic cooling techniques are cer-

tainly exciting, sometimes you just can't

beat a good heatsink and fan

CoollT Freezone Elite

CoolIT Technology's Freezone Elite

is an evolution of the company’s popu- lar Freezone cooler we reviewed in the February 2007 issue of CPU (Vol 7, Issue 2), As its “Elite” moniker implies;

thermoelectric cooling techniques Not

only that, but the Freezone Elite is also

a cinch to install considering its relative technical complexity, and it requires min-

imal maintenance

The Freezone Elite works much like

a traditional liquid-cooling kit; coolant

is circulated by a pump through a water- block mounted atop the CPU and then through a radiator and fan assembly where heat is expelled The thing that

hardware

differentiates the Freezone Elite, howev-

er is its integrated “chiller.” Instead of

relying on the cooling fan and radiator

assembly alone to remove heat from the liquid circulating through the system,

the Freezone Elite uses an array of TEC

to actively chill it In addition, the Free- zone Elite works in conjunction with

Cooll T's MTEC Control Center to

monitor and regulate the temperature of the coolant running through the uni in time The TEC and MTEC Control cer combo ensures that the liquid

coolant remains chilled ar all times and

Freezone Elite

$449.99 | CoollT waw.coolitsystems.com

BS

that the processor's temperature remains

in check, without getting too low and causing condensation The Freezone lite’s 120mm fan is also used to dissi- pate heat generated by the “hot” sides of the TECs as much as it’s used to help

cool the chiller assembly

The MTEC Control Center included

with the Freezone

re offers a few ad-

ditional noteworthy features, as well,

With the MT

can alter key settings that affect the cooler’s performance from within Win- dows It can automatically adjust the fan speed and the amount of power sup- plied to the coolers’ TEC units, and it also features a Predictive Cooling mode

Control Center, users

(CPU RANKING (0 = ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS | @@€ 2.5 = ABSOLUTELY AVERAGE | @

'® @ 5 = ABSOLUTELY PERFECT

PU / June 2008 23

that monitors the CPU temperature when run at its high

and increases cooling power as soon as _est settings As you'll

i detects an increase In addition, the

litdle later, the

PURE

$134.99 | CoolIT www.coolitsystems.com

MTEC Control Center is ESA (Enthu- fone Elite also eon

siast System Architecture)-compliant proved to be a strong

and offers health monitoring through performer About the

Nvidia's software interface If you don't | only negative is the

want to use ESA, however, Coll T’s unit's price At $449,

included software also monitors perti the Freezone Eli

nent PC health data downright expensive

Installing the Freezone Elite requires | We understand that a

licele more than securing the waterblock | lot of R&D went into

in place atop the processor using the designing the unit and that its features

included brackets, making a few electri and performance are top-notch, but CoolIT PURE

cal and USB connections, and then spending almost half a grand for a CPU The Coolf T PURE CPU cooler is very

mounting the chiller assembly to

available 120mm fan location at the back | like the product and

of a case During normal use, we found

the Freezone Elite to be relatively quiet

and unobtrusive, but it is clearly audible affordable levels

Side-By-Side:

W e tested the six coolers

this roundup on an D1

1 0 0i

tock and overclocked config-

urations We installed the cool-

EUSP)

V00 110

RR lay

tel Core 2 Extreme OX9650

processor We loaded Win-

dows Vista Ultimate on the test

$yslem and Used Asus

Probe II health-monitoring uti-

Deeg cure

Pema eas

that utiities such as PC Probe

II dot necessaril report

actual CPU temperatures, but

rather interpret data collected

1 6|

thermal diode Revisions to the

motherboard's BI0S or the

Ae Meas

Tủ 1

disclairter 0ut of the way, te

do feel confident that PC Probe

U12

and that the data collected is

cooler is tough to justify We certainly

an’t faule its per- formance, so it earns a high rating, but

we'd love to see its price drop to more

much alittle brother to the Freezone Elite Atfirst glance, the two units look similar, and they feature the same CPU waterblock

Bur the PURE CPU cooler is not a hybrid

solution like the Freezone, No, the PURE

Specifications & Performance

relevant or ä side-by-side per- Se)

To gather the performance

DU, ran 0ur Core

D000 1i

in cog stock tests, the processor and

motherboard were left in their

def Ies, tith the pr0C6S-

sơr running atts slock speed

of 3GHz with a 1.25V core volt-

ae In the overclocked tests, however, we overclocked the

processor to 3.666Hz by rais- ing its multiplier to 11x and ing the core voltage to

1 T1

est-performing configuratons plicable

To determine idle tempera-

tre, te booted up the test

$ystem and let it sĩt uninter- rupted at the Windows di for 30 minutes Once the tem-

76 2 the number For the load tem- peratures, we fired up SiSoft

§andra's burn-in wizard and

looped the CPU arithmetic

benchmark, which placed a 100% load on al four proces:

(oes Looking at the performance ddala,a fewthings became clear

he ambient temperalure | an pensive product, but the Freezone Elle delvers.Ils more affordable counterpart, the PURE CPU cooler, also per- formed well considering itis an 0lta-quiet, reladiwely small solu- Peat ety

uspeot that had we used

an oldar 65nm Core 2 Extreme 0X6850, as 0pposed to the 45nm 0X9650, we may hị b8en able t0 completely satur-

Ba ae eg hhybrid solutions, the Xigmatek Al0-S80DP and Kinguin Gia

imply did perform

as well as the high-end air coolers Both coolers han- led the workload, bụt for the money, wø'd recommend

Ae Eee aa the AI0-S800P or Gladiator

There's no point in adding another layer of complexit f the performance isn' there

l0 2EROtherm's Nivana NV120 Premium and Cooler Master's Sphere, both performed very

DU mending one over the other difficult In the end, they're 7v

CPU RANKING C` 0= AB§0LUTELY WORTHLESS | ® @ &_ 2.5 = ABS0LUTELY AVERAGE | ® @ ® @ @ 5 = ABSOLUTELY PERFECT

24 uo n

the same mounting hardware The unit's | of aluminum heatsink fins with a copper

radiator and fan assembly also mounts | base connected to the fins by what look

in an available 120mm fan location, just like copper heat pipes But in actuality like the Freezone unit One area where they aren’ heatpipes at all, at least not the two units clearly differ, however, is in the traditional sense

in their noise output During normal Running up from the cooler’s copper operation, the PURE CPU cooler is vir- base are 8mm-thick pipes that carry a wally silent liquid coolant The liquid coolant is The CoollT PURE CPU cooler couldn't | circulated through the pipes by a small keep up with the Freezone in the perfor- water pump that's affixed co the side of mance department, though it did ourper-

Eladlatur form a couple of the other units in our

$49.99 | Kingwin side-by-side comparisons It may not be

While it may not leverage Cool[T's a massive, standard air cooler with a LOZ

TEC cooling technology, the PURE is funky shroud mounted on top of what ` ZZ

still an intriguing product and obviously appears to be a tower-type heatsink— A0-5800P >

borrows heavily from the Freezone’s de- then again, maybe it looks like a mini $44.99 | Xigmatek

sign, The PURE CPU cooler is just as football helmet if you're the sports type | Www-xigmatek.com

easy to install onto a processor and uses | This cooling unit features alarge array | @ @€

Freezone Elite | PURE l4 ladiator L0, ba 45 Master

L Aree) TT $44.99 rrr) =1

Anodized Alloy j AnodizedAlloy ¡ Aluminum Aluminum Com eed

Fan Size 120mm 120mm 80mm 100mm pe) C0)

11) 1 ae Variable 1.800 to.3:200rpm | 1.800 t0 2,600rpm _700 to 2.800rpm 2.200rpm

Maximum Airilow 120 GEM XE: } 27.68 to 52.72 CEM LN 84.7 CEM eae

the unit, Essentially, the Kingwin Gladi-

ator is a completely self-contained water-

cooling kit that mounts directly to a CPU,

In liew of having a separate waterblock

connected to a radiator via flexible tub-

ing, like the CoolIT PURE, for example,

the Gladiator is one assembly

Unfortunately, despite its size, the Glad-

iator didn’t live up to our expect

‘one, the fan on the unit is loud; this was

ceasily the loudest cooler we tested for this

roundup And the Gladiator's performance

lefe something to be desired, as wel I's

not that performance was poor, per se, but

the Gladiator couldn’t hang with a cheap-

cr, straight-up air cooler Ultimately, all

the water pump and custom tubing add

to the product is another potential point

of failure

s For

Xigmatek Al0-S80DP

On some levels, the Xigmatek AIO-

S80DP is similar co the Kingwin Gladi

tor Both units are monolithic assemblies

that mount directly to a CPU Both fea-

ture an integrated water pump and radi-

ator, and both are made of copper and

aluminum, Where the two differ is in

the quality of the materials used Whereas

the Gladiator is bright, shiny, and pol-

ished, the Xigmatek AIO-S80DP has a

more raw look to it The unit's copper

base i polished nicely, but che radiator

looks dull and gray, like an automobile

heater core

Other than the look of its materials,

though, the Xigmatek AIO-S8ODP has a

few redeeming qualities, Its integrated

‘water pump is sealed directly in the base

of the unit, encased in metal And its fan is sandwiched in between two small radiators on either side Not only docs this configuration protect the pump and fan, but it also helps keep the Xigma- tek AIO-S8ODP relatively quiet Ie’s not

as silent as the PURE or Cooler Master Sphere, but itis much less obtrusive than the Gladiator

‘The Xigmatck AIO-S80DP’s perfor

mance was mediocre, though, consi

irsa liq product is going to consume more power

to run pump and a fan and introduce an additional point of fullue, it should offer

a compelling reason to choose it—cither strong performance or silence—and the Xigmatek AIO-S80DP offers neither in light ofits competition We wouldn't call

the Xigmarek AIO-S80DP a bad product,

bur there are better options out there for the money

cooler In our opinion,

ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 Premium

The ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120

Premium is one beast of an air cooler

This baby features a large, tower-type aluminum heatsink connected to a heavy copper base via four heatpipes The entire unit is nickel-plated, however, so allof its surfaces have a shiny, chrome-

like appearance, The Nirvana NV120

Premium also features a 120mm fan mounted to one side of the unit and includes a fan controller which owners can use to tweak the fan for high or low speed operations Obviously, with the unit's fan spinning at high speed, the Nirvana NV120 Premium offers beter performance at the expense of some ad- ditional noise

Installation of the cooler is simple and straightforward, and despite its relatively

large size, the NV120 Premium is light

‘enough that it won't put undue stress on the motherboard or CPU socket Perfor- mance was also very good, esting all others coolers we tested with the excep- tion of the Freezone Elite Overall, the ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 Premium

is an excellent product capable of keep- ing today’s most powerful processors

running nice and cool, even in over- clocked situations

Cooler Master Sphere

Cooler Master struck a nice balance with its Sphere CPU cooler The Sphere features an oversized, all-copper heat- sink, which, as its name implies, is shaped somewhat like a sphere At the center of the spherical heatsink lies a barrel-type 66mm fan that blows air out through the entire circumference of the cooler The fan's unique design allows

it to move a lot of air (84.7 CFM) with- our generating much noise at all The Sphere is outfitced with a copper base that's linked co the heatsink fin by four curved heatpipes

Sphere

$44.99 | Cooler Master www.coolermaster.com

e

‘The Cooler Master Sphere is easy

to install and includes all necessary hardware, and performance is quite good Although it's not as tall as and

is quieter than the Nirvana NV120, the Sphere came within a couple of degrees of ZEROtherm’s offering, It's also worth noting that at $44.99, the Cooler Master Sphere (along with the

Xigmatek AIO-S80DP) had the lowest

price of the bunch Considering its qui-

et operation, good performance, and

competitive price, we recommend the

Sphere to anyone in the market for a quality air cooler A

Godfather of all chassis

hardware

Adesso AKB-220

K eyboards take plenty of abuse We

drop crumbs and spill drinks into

them, pound them mercilessly with our

fingers (or, after our party wipes for the

third time in WoW, our fists) When we

head to a LAN party, we jam them into

bags loaded with other equipment and

hope for the best

‘Adesso had rough environments in

mind when it created the AKB-220,

which is water-resistant, tough, and ex-

tremely flexible, Ie’s so flexible, in fact,

that you can roll it up and shove it into

one of your travel bag’s pockets Another

important feature is its standard-sized

QWERTY layout Ic has arrow keys,

function keys, and even a number pad

‘Thanks to the AKB-220's silicon-based

body, the keyboard never lost its shape I

routinely rolled it into a bundle smaller than

a paperback book and crammed it into my

“The keyboard does have one hard component, however, which is the small PCB near the number pad The ke board's soft exterior creates a water-tight

lock that will handle any spills; I dunked

the keyboard underwater and used it again without trouble,

Typing on the board was surpri easy Each raised key gave just a litele resistance, making it feel much like a standard keyboard key Still, there's

no question that my venerable Micro- soft Natural Keyboard Elite provides softer keystrokes

Importantly, the keys dropped (rather

than bend to the side) when I pressed them, even if I pressed only a corer of a

ly

Creative Aurvana X-Fi

At the first set of headphones ro in-

corporate Xtreme Fidelity technolo-

‘gy; Creative's Aurvana X-Fi headphones

have set the bar high for others hoping to

follow Creative's lead

“The Xtreme Fidelity technology in-

i Crystalizer and the X-Fi

signed to work with your compressed

audio in order to improve the quality of

your music, and the result is enhanced

clarity for your entire digital music collee=

tion The X-Fi Crystalizer is not a smart

technology that can determine whether

the bass line of your favorite song is on

par with the quality of the same song,

recorded on the album So, it boosts the

sound quality for every song played

‘To check out the X-Fi Crystalizer, I lis-

tened to the same song on my iPod with

the feature turned on, and then turned

off There was a difference, but you might

not realize the difference unless

parison, I popped a movie into my laptop

and compared the surround-sound fea-

tures of the Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA2

great replacement for your notebook’s

the noise-cancelling features of the

Aurvanas, combined with the surround-

sound audio, pushed the Aurvanas ahead

of the Turtle Beach headphones

The Aurvana X-Fi headphones are

comfortable enough to wear for a long period of time—even while wearing both earrings and glasses The ear cups rest comfortably, without clamping down, while the material around the ear cups is surprisingly breathable The Aurvana X-Fi

headphones come with a case that’s not

terribly portable, but could still fic into a

carry-on bag A

by Tessa Warner Breneman

Creative Aurvana X-Fi

$299.99 Creative us.creative.com

28 June 2008 / www.computerpowerusercom

AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition

MD has been busily revising its

line of quad-core Phenom proces- without havi

sors After a somewhat lackluster debut, Phenom

the Phenoms have received some up-

grades, First came the Black Edition

series, which allowed for overclocking

flexibility, courtesy of an unlocked mul-

tiplier AMD has now followed the orig-

inal BEs with a set of processors bearing

50-series monikers: the 9550, 9650,

9750, and 9850

These new 50-series processors osten-

sibly fix the TLB (translation lookaside

buffer) problem that infamously ham-

pered performance in previous Phenom

releases (If you listen closely, you can

hear a collective cheer coming from

AMD fans everywhere.) This fix final-

ly lets AMD pic its processors ag:

Intels without the performance handi:

cap of the TLB

The current king of the Phenom hill is

the X4 9850 Black Edition The 9850

boasts a clock speed of 2.5GHs, and it

gets a slight performance boost from the

2GHz memory controller Because the

memory controller has its own power!

voltage control and clock, memory per-

formance isn’t mitigated by a divisor

based on the C!

When comparing the benchmark scores

of the 9850 to the Phenom 9600 Black

Edition, it's worth noting that at aunch,

s clock

each processor cost nearly the same: The

9600 was $239, while the 9850 will retail

for $235 The scores for the 9850 are ni

moderately better, with the only notable ie

differences in specifications between the feu

two a slightly slower processor (2.3GHz)

and a slightly slower HyperTransport Link

(3.6GH2) in the 9600

With a $235 price rag, the 9850 is

a relatively inexpensive processor Al-

ProduetIiy

though the problems in previous Phenom

offerings caused us to balk at upgrading

from Athlon 64 X2 processors, the TLB

fix brings some peace of mind For enthu-

siast-class gamers, home-theater nuts,

or users who are looking for a serious

upgrade to a Socket AM2-based system

to build a new rig, the

9850 is a very nice option,

Ir’s also a fine choice for users who are

looking for a CPU around which to build

a low-cost quad-core system

by Seth Colaner

Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition

$235 AMD 'www.amd.com eco

3enchmark Numbers

RO DU X4 9850 BE 201212

30

Asus Striker Il Extreme

N Vidia's long-awaited nForce 790i SLI

chipset is finally here, and it brings

with ira wealth of new technology for

gamers and performance enthusiasts alike

The 790% SLI also offers official support for

Ince 1,600MHz FSB processors, such as

the new Core 2 Extreme QX9770 In ad-

dition, the chipset has more than enough

horsepower to handle substa

overclocking Although ic “offcia

supports DDR3 speeds up to

the 790i SLI should easily handle data rates

up to 2GHz, depending on the mother-

ond coming of its Striker ser

Republic of Gamers family of mother

boards The original Striker Extreme was

based on Nvidia's 680i SLI chipset, and

the feature-packed board was a hit among,

high-end users In short, Asus

builds on or updates all ofthe Striker Extreme's primary features

and benefits and combines them with a

‘complete platform refresh: 790i SLI Ultra

‘Asus’ Supreme FX discrete ADI 19888B gh-def audio PCI-E x1 card is back, aptly dubbed Supreme FX II on this board Beyond that, the featue lst goes

‘on, with support for 3-Way SLI, as wel, and native PCLE 2.0 links in the north bridge; there's no need for Ni F100 PCLE 2.0 bridge chip

Performan

Vantage’s Overall score (5853) À

by Dave Altavilla ket LGA776; nForce 790i SLI Ultra; Max memory: 8GB (DDR3-1333);

E x1, 2 PCI; Ports 6 SAT/

'WW/W.8SUS.C0m eco

KT

CỔ

Ed

eed Express

Fert ies Gamng renee

a 5131 Creer

N7 RA)

Lo za Sony Vegas""_ 192 3DMark06 CPU 430

WidowPC Sting 917D SLI

ith its 2.66GHe Intel Core 2 Quad

6700 processor, the Sting 917D

SLI performed significantly better in

some of the CPU- intensive benchmarks

We use to compare notebooks For example,

ing 917D SLI scored 10689 in the

Cinebench 10 multithreaded test, com

pared t0 5768 for the Dell XPS M1730

with a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme

X9000, Still, he Q6700 didn’t win

in all tests: The MI730% overall

PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0 score

(4445) beat the Sting 917D

SLI’s (3942)

As you might guess

from its name, the Sting

917 SLI is capable of

SLI, though my test model

had only a single Nvidia

GeForce Go 8800M GTX

When configuring this laptop, you

can select up to three hard drives for

The Sting 917D SLI's 17-inch, 1,680 x 1,050 WSXGAs ClearView Super Bright display was clear, Compared to some of the previous laptops I've reviewed, the

eo

3DMark06 Pro 1.1 all

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Dr Divx 2.0.1°

PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0"*

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POV-Ray 3.7 Beta"

WinRAR 3.71 ° D1 ST.AL.KER, World in Conflict

THUNDER =”

Power supply for PC

Power Charger for USB device

| 3 in 1 power supply| 1 power supply > Satay

pressure for heal dissipation

mwaveccom &

hardw:

Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000

“ve been pushing the ergonomically gifted

Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 around my

desk for about a month now, and although

Logitech’s MX Air is still my favorite ro-

dent where aesthetics are concerned, the

6000 may be the best match my right hand

hhas met since donning my first baseball

glove so many years ago The comfort this

mouse immediately transmits is palpable (at

least for my medium-large hand) Factor in

its prowess for mobile or desktop use, and

Microsoft has crafted a mouse definitely

worthy of laying hands on

With a deep, sweeping indent at the

thumb and slight grooves for the index and

middle fingers, the 6000 felt as if Micro-

soft’ engineers molded ic specifically for

my ha Tilt Wheel

was perfectly placed, as were two thin pro-

‘grammable buttons (via Intel

software) above the thumb One button

he accompanying image doesn’t do

the 705 WiFi’s size justice Trust me;

this beast is a beast Spanning 7 inches

across the touch-sensitive widescreen dis-

play (800 x 480), the 705 is more Asus

ized than PMP Still, if you have

enough bucks and biceps, the 7

tantalizing proposition Like Archos’ pre-

vious PMPs—including the excellent

and similar 605 WiFi (160GB, $399.99;

4,3-inch screen)—the 705 is al bite

To illustrate the 705's girth, consider

Cowon 30GB A3 ($389.99) is 9.9

ounces and measures 4 inches across the

screen (800 x 480) Apple's 32

touch ($499) is 4.2 ounces and 3

(480 x 320) Creative's 60GB Zen Vision

W ($499.99) is 10.48 ounces and 4.3

inches (480 x 272) The 705, meanwhile,

isa chest-thumping 22 ounces and 4.96 x

7.05 inches (HxW) Have 200 movies

grants one-click access to Microsoft's Mag

nifier tool; the other defaults to Back

Clicking the Tilt Wheel activates Flip 3D

in Vista or Instant Viewer in Windows XP, and a green/red LED near the Tilt Wheel indicates power status Asa nod toward mobility, a slotted carriage on the bottom securely holds the accompanying 2.4GHz, USB receiver (30-foot range), which pow cers down the mouse (two AAs required)

is journal-sized, for Pete's sake

Not that you'll likely journal much,

‘There's much to do here Beyond DVR recording using an optional DVR Station Gen 5 dock, the 705 gives you Wi-Fi browsing via Opera’s rock-solid mobile browser 3s media streaming, and wireless rentals from Archos Content Portal The headphone jack does composite video-out duty, and a USB host port let me upload photos from my digicam Widgets, PDF viewing, and Flash games are also here The improved UL is ico

file browser isa finger-tap away

Audio and video quality resided on the good side of average Although the two integrated s

Razers upcoming and freakishly q

Salmosa (1,800dpi; Ims response time),

but the 6000 flowed without hiccups on desktops, kitc ertops, and other surfaces I tested on Additionally, Microsoft thankfully didn’t shrink the 6000's size for mobility’s sake, instead

retaining the size and heft of a desktop

mouse Though not as travel-friendly as

Logitech’s VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse,

the 6000 didn’t have my palm and fingers contorting around a dis

If you've been looking for a mouse equally good on the desktop or in your travel bag, look no further

sponsiveness Even worse is that the DVR

station ($99), Opera plug-in ($29.98), H.264 and MPEG-2 plug-ins ($19.99 cach), and proprietary AV cable ($12.99) cost you extra AA

by Blaine Flamig

705 WiFi (80GB)

$399 Archos www.arch0s.com ecco

Boyng Alibi

TT Boyng Alibi doesn't look anything

like any other Web cam or computer

speaker you may have siting next to your

computer, but that’s what makes it special

Rarely can you find something that not only

appeals to your creative side but can also

hold is own with other devices in its clas

Shooting at 1.3MP, 30fps, and 640 x

480 resolution, the Web cam offered clear-

cer video in Winamp compared to the

Microsoft LifeCam VX-3000, which also

features 1.3MP and 640 x 480 resolution

‘The Alibi also portrayed a more accurate,

rich color, making the Microsoft LifeCam

VX-3000 look washed out comparatively

“The Alibi also had a larger field of view,

but no zoom feature It tilts up 25 degrees

and rotates up to 300 degree:

When using the Alibi with Skype, it

picked up clear audio without a single

T Upgrader isa com-

pact access point that lets you add the

improved throughput and coverage area of

802.1 1n (draft 2.0) to your lega

Additionally, the Easy-N-Upgrader detects

and utilizes the IP address of

your existing router, so you

don't need to manually config-

ure the IP settings on the add-

‘on access point For wireless

‘encryption, the access point lets

you set up manual WEP or

WPAIWPA2 security modes,

also supports WPS (Wi-Fi

Protected Setup) mode

Setup consists of installing

the Trendner software, con-

necting the power adaprer

and Ethernet cord, and

ng the base stand,

ul-range driver; Echo 98SE or higher, Mac

of the muffled sound that often happens using a builtin microphone on other Web cams, Voices stil had a distant, speaker- phone-like audio quality, however

up our WEP or WPA securi

‘was a snap

A larger WPS push-button

control would be nice, because it's difficult to distinguish the push-button from the line of icons on the router The compact design made it easy for us to find

a place for the Easy-N-Upgrader next to our router You'll have

to give up one of your router's

Ethernet ports to make the con-

nection, of course

‘To test the throughput,

Trendnet sent us its Wireless N

PC Card (model TEW-621PC),

and we used pmaSoft’s On-

lineEye to monitor the transfer rate of a S00MB

‘When I played a CD on my computer, the

sound came across clear and crisp but se- lacked depth Along with the clumsi- ness ofthe cords, ths feature was the Alib's biggest downfall The

feature incorporated, however, isa quality that many Web cams lack

The appearance of the Alibi is wha

makes it unique, with an hourglass-shaped body and a camera that pops out to power

on the device A ring around the middle

controls the volume, and the rubber finish

gives Ít a smooth, soft appearance At firs, the Alibi appears to bea litde bit large and clumsy, but considering the tasks it per- forms, it’s fairly compact device Ak

folder with documents, multimedia, and system files We were impressed with the

regular 80 to 100Mbps rate when the Easy-

N-Upgrader was within 5 feet We did experience an occasional drop-off in the

signal (generally down to 29Mbps), but the drop-offs weren’t long enough or often enough to cause a problem, For ease of use,

we like thatthe Easy-N-Upgrader supports WPS, and with the push-button control, wwe were able to integrate a Brother HL- 2170w printer on our network in seconds Considering the Easy-N-Upgrader’s features and price, this add-on access

point is perfect for those who want to add

the advantages of 802.1 1n but are other-

wise happy with their current router A

by Nathan Lake

300Mbps Wireless Easy-N-Upgrader

$63.99 Trendnet www-trendnet.com

°

hardw:

Dymo DiscPainter

T he world isn’t short on inkjet printers

that can spray waterproof color images

on compatible CDs and DVDs What

Dymo has done with its DiscPainter is

make the process fun to watch,

“This dedicated disc printer has

been around awhile, and we'd

more or less let it pass without

comment But when we saw a

DiscPainter up close and watched

it color a disc from the inside out

before our very eyes, suddenly we

wanted to take one home The device lets

you watch the process under a transpar-

ent canopy If you've ever watched a

lathe true up the face of a disc brake

rotor, picture that in Technicolor

‘The DiscPainter uses a thre

consulting you

Ie took our DiscPainter approximately

‘two minutes to spray a full-color photo

DiscPainter

$279.95 Dymo wwiw.dymo.com eco

conto an inkjet-printable disc at

normal quality, and only three minutes at top quality with more ink density That's

much faster than LightScribe, and not in

monochrome Our high-quality glossy discs looked nice and colorful, but details were soft and flesh tones grainy The gadget sup- ports inkjet-printable discs with matte white, glossy white, and even silver surfaces

Of course, with a $279.95 price and

{$39.95 replacement cartridges, the Disc- Painter loses some of its luster Afterall,

you can buy an inkjet with aCD/DVD

printing tray—not to mention the ability

to print on paper, too—for $90 or so Á

Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro, Stick

dding a TV tuner to a PC normally

requires an internal slot, so notebooks

have generally been left out of the “Usea

PC like a TiVo” game, but the Pinnacle

PCTV HD Pro Stick changes the rules

like a fat USB thumb drive with

an antenna connector, the PCTV HD Pro

Sdck brings both SDTV and HDTV to

any PC with a USB 2.0 port and sufficient

CPU speed (Pinnacle recommends a dual-

core Intel or AMD Athlon 64 CPU for

HD), meaning you can watch good-look-

ing HDTV in almost any metropolitan

area with just a notebook computer

The hardware is impressive With the

bundled 3-foor mini-antenna connected,

the PCTV HD Pro Stick was able to pull

in about 30 digital ATSC HDTV chan-

rls and 25 conventional analog channels,

even though we were indoors and about

40 miles south of Los Angeles The analog

I snow-fes, but the

at full sereen, the image rivaled the best images seen on any “real” HDTV The device uses an F-connector but includes RCA and S-Video adapters

‘The bundled software is ess impres-

sive, and anyone expecting to replace the

household TiVo will be in for a disap-

pointment To be sure, the software

works, in the sense that you can record programs cither directly or via a timer from a program guide; pause live TV:

change channels with your mouse or the bundled IR remote; and even burn directly

other PVR packages, so better software options are available

In the end, we found the PCTV HD

Pro Stick to be fairly amazing hardware slightly hobbled by merely average soft-

‘ware, Stil its convenient USB form factor and excellent image quality make it well worth considering, especially if you live where digital HD signals ae available À

or

Vigor Gaming Force Recon QXN

F the Force Recon QXN is any kind of

example, Vigor Gaming is a be

thar if one is good, two is bert

with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX'

three Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX video

cards in a 3-Way SLI configuration, 4GB

of Kinston Hyper-X DDR-3-1,600MHz

RAM, nwo 150GB Western Digital Rap-

tor X drives, and two 750GB Western

Digital C:

Recon QX

berter” attitude we can get behind

The QXN houses its components in-

side the Tagan CS-EL Diablo BM case,

which typically includes a 360mm side-

panel fan But Vigor Gaming removed

the inch-thick fan because it prevented

the use of high-end CPU coolers The

builder did

job—a two-tone color that shifts

n purple and green:

the Vigor Gaming logo on the side of the

system There are bright blue LEDs in

nice job on the custom

well as on the 250mm fan in front of the

lower drive cage The visible glow from

the 250mm fan gives the appearance of a

jec engine's air intake The interior also

features a few blue LEDs, but because

most of the components are stacked at the

bottom of the case, the interior LED drew

our attention to the case's empty space,

rather than the top-shelf components

In terms of airflow, the 250mm fan

moves air over the four hard drives and

three video cards, and you can control the

fan speed from thumb-wheel controls on

the side of the eae, To cool the processor,

Vigor Gaming installed a Cooler Master

Hyper 212 heatpipe air-cooler, which

wicks the heat out to a 120mm fan that

pushes air directly out to the rear chassis’

120mm fan Even with the 250mm fan set

to maximize speed, the system ran quiet

‘As of press time, y

release the 9800 GTX, and we tested the

QXN with Nvidia's ForceWs

ation driver The QXN’s scores were

impressive but sometimes inconsistent

when compared to other systems we've

recently Vigor Gaming had Nvidia

9800 GX2 Quad SLI

mod the 17:

driver to make 3-Way SLI work and says

the inconsistent results could be chalked

3DMark06 were lower than

ve seen with comparable hardware

Everything considered, the high-end components and artistry of the Force

Recon QXN show that Vigor Gaming knows how to design

power user Vigor Gaming indicates that customers will be able to configure the QXN with the 9800 GTX and 790i by the time you read this, The boutique PC builder offers a 30-day money-back guar- antee and a three-year parts and labor war- ranty on all systems (which also covers

y overclocks Vigor Gaming performs at the customers req

a system for the

fe lo) ulithreaded (min:sec)ˆ

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oe Ori oard: Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra; RAM: 4GB King:

DU aa

TT Home Premium (

hardw:

A-Data DDR3-1600X

-Data has entered the high-end

DDR3 memory fray with a new line

of memory kits that fall under its X Series

brand, which is rargeted at overclockers

“The A-Data DDR3-1600X memory kít s

one of many available based on Micron’s

popular chips It comprises a pair of GB

sticks (2GB total) rated for operation at a

speedy 1,600MHz with CAS latencies of

7-7-7-20 Ac that speed, the kit requires a

relatively low 1.75 to 1.85 volts

Although 1,600MHz system memory is

nothing to sneeze at, we still spent some

time overclocking this kit

bea pretty good overclocker With a bump

in voltage to 2V, the DDR3-1600X kit

had no trouble running at 1,804MEIz at

and we suspect that it could

have gone higher if we had relaxed the

timings a bit On a related note, the

Silverstone Zeus ZM1200M

he seemingly never-ending onslaught

of high-end power supplies contin-

ues with the

1,200-wart Z

ase of rstone’s

sus ZM1200M If you're

Silverstone, best known for

making swanky cases, also has a full line

of power supplies designed for different

applications, such as silent home-theater

PCs or industrial workstations The Zeus

lineup is targeted at power users with

high-end processors and SLI or Cross-

Fire configurations

‘The Silverstone Zeus XM1200M sports

a number of interesting features ts +12V

rail configuration, for example, can be

tha 95A peak output rating to a six-rail setup, each with a

17A peak output Unlike low-quality PSUs

that are tested at unrealistic temperatures,

the XM1200M is rated for 1,200W of con-

tinuous power output at up to 50 degrees

or XMP, so you'll have to do all

of the overclocking the old-fashioned way

When running at its rated frequency of

1,600MHz on an Asus X48-based moth- erboard, the DDR3-1600X kit put up a

respectable 7.8GBps of memory band-

width in ft Sandra XII SP1's band-

width benchmark And when we pushed the kit to 1.8GHz while overclocking, that number jumped up to 8.5GBps

“Those aren't the best numbers w from a DDR3 memory kis, but they were good nonetheless

Ac this point, DDR3 memory is still

much more expensive than DDR2, But

below; 28dBA at GOOW; and 40dBA ac 1,200W) rerstone also rates the PSU's

ficiency at over 80% and states that only high-quality Japanese capacitors are used in

with an expected street price of about

$250, A-Dara’s DDR3-1600X kit will debut ata price roughly half of what com- peting DDR3-1600 kits commanded upon their initial release, Although still pricey in comparison to DDR2, the DDR3-1600X kir is relatively good value

a GeForce 9800 GX2 and multiple drives, the XM1200M never faltered, even

after hours of abuse with a sustained 750 to 800W load The unit's cooling fan did get loud, but it wasn't bad in compar- ison to other >1,000+kW power supplies Silverstone has done a good job with the XM1200M At about 400 bucks, it’s somewhat pricey in light of competing, offerings from Thermaltake, ABS, and Cooler Master, but itis definitely a rock- solid product worthy of consideration

ww silverstonetek.com ecco

The Intel Updates:

Atom, Nehalem & Larrabee

ante’ been pretty active as of late with product and technology dis-

closures For starters, we have the Atom processor Intel's smallest

CPU is built on a die that less than 25mm; by comparison, Intel’

45nm Penryn-based Core 2 Duo processor has a 107mm die,

Atom is so very small thanks to a very simple two-issue, in-order

architecture, making it Incl’ first

orig

the benefit of aboue a decade and a half

of additional microprocessor research,

enabling Intel to make such a small

chip perform quite well for its size,

While I'm mostly excited about

Atoms smaller, more integrated future

(check back again in 2009 or 2010), 1

am particularly impressed with a single

demo I saw of Atom earlier this year

Intel had an Atom system running

‘Windows Vista and playing a game of

Unreal Tournament 2004 The game

was running off of the Atom platform's

integrated graphics (a PowerVR SGX

core) and at very smooth frame rates

Now, nothing about what I've just suid

is particularly impressive until you real-

ning without a heatsink The surface

‘temperature of the CPU was around 35

Cand, like I said, it did not require

even a heatsink, much less a fan

The Atom processor will sll for

around $45 10 $160 (chipset included) and

will dissipate between 0.65 and 2.4,

depending on clock speeds/features Inte is

targeting the Atom at MIDs (Mobile Inter-

net Devices), but I suspect that initial suc-

cesses will be mostly ultra-cheap notebooks

and desktops, such as Asus’ Eee PC

Due out at the end of 2008 is Intel’s first

new desktop microarchitecture since the

introduction of the Core 2 Duo, code-

named Nehalem, Nehalem isa four-wide

machine like current Core 2 processors but

allows for 33% more micro-ops in light

Intel improved branch prediction with a sec-

oond-level branch predictor that can help cor-

rect mispredicted branches Welll se the

return of Hyper-Threading with Nehalem,

as each core is capable of simultaneously exe-

cuting two threads Then there’ the biggie:

‘order architecture since the

al Pentium, Unlike the Pentium, Intel's Atom processor has

Ne U eae

Ca

Pe eared

ee a a Anand started his site in 1997 at just ean er eee DEMO ÚC” 02 00-4 N60

0m 1 eae ae

per ee ma

Nehalem will feature an integrated DDR3 memory controller sup- porting anywhere from two to three channels, The combination of these features means that at the same clock speed, we can expect Nehalem offer a dị

Core 2 processors Intel also reworked Nehalem’ cache, reducing the size of the L2 caches to 256KB per core and introducing an

8MB L3 cache shared by all four cores

ificant performance boost over present-day

Finally we have Larrabee, Intel’ up- coming attempt at a fully programmable GPU We donit know much about Larra- bee other than ic will be an array of rela-

"> tively simple, in-order IA cores capable

of executing x86 code with some as-yet- unannounced vector extensions Each

core will have a wide vector processing

unit, and all of the cores will be able to aceess a common cache, The cache archi- tecture and vector instruction set are the

‘two areas in which everyone is expecting

Incl to fle its innovation muscle, Larrabee will make its debur on stand-

alone PCI-E cards in 2009/2010, but

there ae alot of unknowns at this point Larrabee’ power will be exposed if appli- cations (and games) are targeted specifi- cally at its instruction set I suspect that Larrabee wont lead the industry in stan-

dard OpenGL/DirectX performance

upon artval, but if games are written to take advantage of the architecture, we may have a far more powerful GPU on our hands The problem I see is that Larrabee will be

£00 late to make its way into the next-gener- ation game consoles (Xbox 3 and PlaySta- tion 4), so it will remain a PC-only platform for the next few years The console gaming space is much larger than the PC space, which means one of three things for Larra- bee One possibility is that its growth will stagnate until it can be used in game con- soles and thus enjoy mass-market develop- ment, Another is that we'll see a resurgence

in the PC gaming industry enabled by Larra- bee, and a third potential outcome is tha it will predominantly be used to accelerate other sorts of applications (GPGPU) that work well on its architecture Ak

Talk back to Anand at anand@cpumagcom

‘OU une 2008°37

Out With The 8800 GTX

&In With The 9800 GTS?

oO: the super high-end 3D graphics scene, the front has been

rather quiet for about 18 months We gamers havenk rally felt

the need to upgrade our video card setup since installing Nvidia's

‘90nm G80-based GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra, have we? Nvic

since released its successful G92-based products, but those have been

for the midrange and value sectors Nifty new technology and more

cnt, but still not any faster than what we already have And as

i

for AMDI/ATI, well, we're still waiting

and waiting for the performance crown

holder to even get some competition

from AMD Enter Nvidia new Ge-

Force 9800 GTX equipped with 752

million transistors

‘The specs are quite impressive, a-

though markedly similar (where not

marginally improved) to the ourgoing

8800 GTX Based on the new 65am

G92 chip

same number of 128 stream processors

and a 256-bit memory interface with a

512MB frame buffer, you might star ro

scratch your loaf abit The 8800 GTS

512 actually harbors those very same

specs, only at $100 less The graphics

clock has been boosted from 650MHz

on the 8800 GTS to 675-MHz for the

9800 GTX The shader cores (all 128

of them) also run at a slightly faster

also featured a nifty 384-bit memory inter-

face with a 768MH frame buffer, which at

the time seemed decadent

Although the incoming 9800 GTX

sports a 256-bit memory interface and less

memory, the fact that it uses faster 512MB

GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.1GHz mem-

ory (2.2GHz) actually still gives it 70GBps

worth of peak memory bandwidth (down

from 86.4GBps on the 8800 GTX) There

is still some room for concern over memory

bandwidth limitations at the higher resolu-

tions, although Nvidia would argue that

SLI is there for the taking Thats putting

it mildly because 9800 GTX boards come

with dual SLl-edge connectors, allowing

for not just ewo- but now three-way SLI

configurations (with beter scaling than the

8800 GTX) Using the G92 chip means

38 ‘tine 2008 7 Wow computerpowerusercom

cheery Christmas greeting at age sx, Alex “Sharky” Ross became an ema

aa aa -

manufacturing pr rubbish-spouting marketing weasels

swith the best toy The site acquired, he

left in 2001 A London native and

Pa a gaa Alex currently overclocks/tunes Porsche T12

996 Turbos with wuw.sharkwerks.com (TT

that Nvidia’ Hybrid SLI feature i also supported,

use a specified Nvidia-based motherboard, so shutting down a card (or two) to save power should keep the greeny environmentaists at

has bay Being manufactured on 65nm means that the G92-based 9800

GTX is also more efficient with a 156-watt TDP vs the G80-based

8800 GTX’s 185 watts, With a shorter, slimmer, and sleeker design, the 9800 GTS refer-

older 8800 GTX was not equipped with Wvidia's PureVideo HD video engine,

‘dentally Hence, hardware accelera- tion for decoding everyone's favorite

Blu-ray and/or HD DVD content is

now possible (and long overdue) Although the 9800 GTX sits some- where around the top of the single-GPU scene, performance was a bit under- whelming if you rake into account that the outgoing 8800 GTX performs al-

most identically in most games Maybe were spoiled into assuming every time a

top-end GPU comes out from Nvidia,

it supposed to be groundbreaking and obliterate the outgoing unit It really does

go to show just how good the 8800 GTX

‘was and still i This reminds me of the situa- tion thar Porsche finds itself in with the old-

<r 996 Twin Turbo vs the newer 997 Twin

‘Turbo; existing owners arent exactly jumping ship as there isnt enough of a performance

advantage to pull people in

For those of you starting with something

older and/or less fancy, the 9800 GTX cer-

tainly makes more sense Nvidia expects prices to be in the $299 ro $349 range At

the time of going to press, boards from BFG and Evga and were showing up online So, based on that change, I'm not sure you want

to arm your litle brother with a hand-me- down GeForce 8800 GTX just yet, unless you absolutely must have PureVideo A